2. Southland Tales (2006)
The real problem with
Southland Tales is that it wants to say far too much, and in the process of trying to make a movie about absolutely every subject under the sun that interests him, politically and socially, director Richard Kelly doesn't leave any room to actually approach any of his points with any real intelligence. It's almost as if he was told that this would be his last movie ever, and - panicked and confused - Kelly tried to cram his entire brain into
Tales. Alas, he did so with the efficiency of a deluded (but talented) teenager. That's to say, the interlinking stories that make up
Southland Tales are impenetrable: any meaning this movie was supposed to convey is diluted through sheer volume alone. It's packed out to the point that it starts to lose sense incredibly quickly: trying to keep up with
Southland Tales is an exercise in futility. Characters and plot points are thrown at you without any context or connection to the movie at large. If the director was actually trying to say something, his sprawling, confused epic doesn't show it: its scope ultimately renders it pointless.